He had turned footloose, moving from vihara to vihara, an exile not from his faith so much as from the times, and a family is a part of the times… He wrote to his mother—it was some years since he had seen her. He wanted to become a bhikshu, he wrote.
A man drifts away from family and home and becomes a monk, yet nothing fills the void. The only constants are dreams and hallucinations where his mother sometimes appears.
Another son retreats to his room, then disappears. It has been ten years and the father,Sudhakar, doesn’t want to harbour false hope, but the mother, Hemlata, clings to it.
Ardeshir and Firoza face a similar predicament. Only their daughter, Arnavaz, hasn’t gone missing; she lives with them, even in her absence.
A woman, half-estranged from her mother, comes to visit her grandmother, perhaps for the last time.
The stories in this collection are among the finest explorations of family ties you will read—ties that injure and heal; ties that can be everything, yet never enough. Keki Daruwalla, a great poet of our time, proves again that he is also a great master of the short story
About the Author
Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India’s foremost poets and writers. His ten volumes of poetry include Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead (winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, 1984), Landscapes (winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Award, Asia, 1987) and The Map-maker. Among his acclaimed short story collections are Sword and Abyss (1979), The Minister for Permanent Unrest & Other Stories (1996), and Love Across the Salt Desert (2011). His first novel, For Pepper and Christ, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010.He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014. Most recently, he was honoured with the Poet Laureate award at the Tata Literature Live! Mumbai Litfest, 2017. His work has been translated into Spanish, Swedish, Magyar, German and Russian.
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